TL;DR version: 20 years ago today I started writing an enormous story, this year I finally started putting actual effort into it, and now it's almost kinda-sorta readable and I'd love it if anyone would acknowledge the fact that it even exists. It's called The Chronicles of Quelouva.

Way back in 1997, teenaged me and some internet friends set out to start a new video game company. Our founder had one game already in mind that we were going to start developing, but we all foolishly got ahead of our teenaged selves thinking about all the other games that we would make next. To that effect, I started writing a story for one of my game proposals... and then other stories for other, then-unrelated game proposals... and so on before we even had the first game barely begun.

That group of teenage wannabes quickly fell apart, of course, but different members of it kept reforming it with slightly different membership over the years that would follow, one attempt after another under different names. Within about five years the last of them fell apart as well and at that point I basically gave up on all dreams of ever doing any video game development.

But all the while I had continued developing all of those stories from what had once been unrelated game proposals, mutating them drastically over the years, tying them together with each other and with basically every other story idea that occurred to me into an extensive fictional universe.

After the last attempt at a game company died I didn't know what I was ever going to do with all of those ideas, and they mostly languished for about half a decade while I focused on other things, occasionally writing myself notes about further ideas for them. Eventually I started telling myself that some day, when life was all sorted out, I would spend my free time writing a series of books based on the stories, slowly over the course of my entire life. As soon as all of my real problems got fixed, I'd get right on that. It would be my life's work. Something small that I had done besides just struggling to barely survive.

Around 2008, after finally graduating university and subsequently having my entire life fall apart in every facet, I decided that I was going to start writing the basic story ideas down in a readable format because that mythic time of getting life sorted out was never going to come. I came up with a tentative name, "The Chronicles" of... something, eventually settling on "The Chronicles of Quelouva". I put up the bare-bones structure of an outline on my personal website, filled it out with tiny little unreadable scraps of story serving basically just as notes to myself to write more there later, and then started with the first story chronologically and tried to actually write something worth reading about it.

I barely got through one rough draft of that first story. Life kept getting harder and I just couldn't think clearly enough to write anything that sounded good. It was too much, I was too exhausted, I couldn't force myself to be creative enough after every long day of shit. At least that's what I told myself. Whenever I actually feel good for long enough, I told myself, I'll get back to it. Just start writing the next story. And keep going and eventually it will all be done. But of course I never felt good enough, and that never happened, and almost another decade went by with no progress besides the occasional further notes to myself to write something more later about an idea I'd just had whenever I could get around to it.

Around the end of 2016 and the start of this year, I ended up writing myself surprisingly many neat ideas to write more about later, and I was subsequently reflecting on how what I had online was such an unreadable mess that nobody could even just take in the big picture of what it was I was aiming to create without wading through the crap excuse for an outline I had managed to create so far. If I were to just die right then, nobody would even have the vaguest idea what it was in my head that I had once dreamt of "spending my life creating". So despite being busier and more beat down by life than ever, I forced myself to find some time to write at least a highest-level summary of the big picture, all on one (albeit long) page.

And then I thought, you know what, I'll write some little three-paragraph summaries of each of the three sagas that the whole project is divided into, just writing like a paragraph a night every other night (ish), over the course of less than a month. Something slow, and manageable, just so that people can see on a high level what it was that I once dreamt of making -- so that like, maybe, if I died and people found all of my notes to myself, someone might find it worth sorting through them and assembling it all into what the summary painted a rough picture of.

But then after that month of fairly easy slow high-level summarizing was past, I thought to myself, this is easy enough, maybe I can expand each of those three paragraphs per saga into three paragraphs of its own, so that each of the 27 core stories (nine trilogies across the three sagas) has its own one-paragraph summary. I can keep up this pace for a few more months and do that, and that would be a better summary than what I have so far. So I did that.

And then, after that wasn't too hard either, I did the math and realized that if I split each of those paragraphs into three again, working at the same slow pace, I could flesh out each story into its own full page, three-paragraph summary by the end of the year. As kind of a challenge to myself, I decided to try that. And so far, I've been keeping it up. I'm about two thirds of the way done (almost 40,000 words in), right about to begin the climactic final stretch of it, and on schedule to have these summaries finished by the end of the year.

Not only that, but I realized I was having difficulty keeping most "paragraphs" down under a full screen of text, so I started automatically splitting them into threes again (and went back and split up the ones I'd already done), giving each part of each tripartite story its own page with its own three-paragraph summary. And then my English-major girlfriend pointed out to me that the figure I had looked up for an average paragraph was actually about a full page of double spaced text, and I could do well to split each of them in turn into three smaller, more readable paragraphs.

So now the whole thing is structured into "Episodes" (summed up in this phase into three short paragraphs each), three of them per "Part" of each tripartite "Story" of each trilogy "Series", of which there are three per each of the three "Sagas" of the overall Chronicles. That adds up to about the equivalent of nine full-length (27-episode) television seasons' worth of story, with a word count for just these summaries approximating what Google tells me is about that of a small novel (almost 60,000 words), once it's done by the end of the year.

Of course these are only summaries, not full scripts, and I've basically put no effort at all into making them look or sound pretty, just putting the ideas down in a minimally coherent form. But I've already done more to bring this thing that was once going to be my "life's work" into some kind of readable form this year than in all the twenty years that I was "working" on it before.

And that's why I'm telling you about it now. A month or two ago I realized, thinking that maybe I would remember this as the year I finally did something about the Chronicles, that I've been sitting on all of this for about twenty years now. And because I'm a digital pack rat, I still have the original text document in which I wrote the first draft of the very first game proposal that eventually grew into this project, with a creation date of August 25th, 1997 -- exactly a month after my fifteenth birthday, and twenty years ago today.

I just wanted to commemorate that anniversary somewhere.

If you want to see the very rough work still in progress, I'm posting it to my personal website as I go. If anyone wants to ask questions or point out typos or anything like that, I'd love just to know that anyone at all even looked at it:

I read the introduction, and when I clicked 'more info' from the canonical first story it sent me to Episode2 of 2/2/2/2, should I start there, or at Episode 1 of 2/2/2/2?(Figured it out myself, it's ep.2)If you want to dive right into the story, start here and click next narratively after reading each page. I would recommend reading Pfhorrest's intro post first, though.

A navigation bar below the text as well as above it would make for slightly better flow when reading.

While Amitabha and the main ship remain docked with the Eye in the outer reaches of the solar system, in superluminal communication with Sol through the ansible link at its core

This and a few other places should maybe say star system instead of solar system to avoid momentary confusion regarding who is where.

GnomeAnne wrote:I read the introduction, and when I clicked 'more info' from the canonical first story it sent me to Episode2 of 2/2/2/2, should I start there, or at Episode 1 of 2/2/2/2?(Figured it out myself, it's ep.2)

Yep. I need to update that introductory outline to reflect some changes that have happened as I've been working deeper and deeper (including starting at the Episode level rather than the Part level as I had planned when I wrote that), and I plan to go back and do so once I have the one-sentence summary outlines completed. (You might note that a few of the higher-level outlines, so far just /1/, /2/, /3/, /1/1/, /1/2/, /2/1/, /2/2/, /3/1/, and /3/2/, have nice short <ol>-formatted one-sentence summaries of their contents, but /1/3/, /2/3/, /3/3/, and everything deeper than two levels deep, all have sometimes-enormous paragraphs of text instead; I'm slowly going through behind myself and cleaning all of that up, leaving only the five-levels-deep Episodes with actual, reasonably-sized, paragraphs of text).

If you want to dive right into the story, start here and click next narratively after reading each page. I would recommend reading Pfhorrest's intro post first, though.

Do you think I need to do something to make it more obvious that people should start there? I do worry sometimes that that "First Episode" link at the very top might be too easy to gloss over. Should I maybe put the narrative-order outline (which will be shorter once it's redone) above the saga-level outline that's currently the first thing with links?

ETA: I realized I was much closer to having one-sentence summaries enough to rewrite the outline than I thought, so I just did that tonight, and removed the saga-level outline entirely (replacing it, kinda, with inline links in prose throughout the intro), so the first thing people get to is a narrative-order outline, down to the episode level, that's more concise and easier to read now.

A navigation bar below the text as well as above it would make for slightly better flow when reading.

I have considered doing that, though it'd be a little hard to structure into the layout of the site. Do you think maybe a single link to just the next episode in narrative order would suffice? E.g. at the bottom of Beyond the Eye of Chaos: Part 2, Episode 2, after the last paragraph, have just a one-sentence <p>:

"Continue to Darak Meij: Part 2, Episode 2"

Also I'm feeling kind of awkward about having things named with numbers being canonically ordered out of sequence with those numbers (e.g. your confusion about whether Beyond p2e2 is really the "first" episode above). Do you think it's necessary to come up with prosaic names for every episode to fix that? (That's a lot of names to come up with). Or maybe some shorter, more obscure and easily-overlooked numbering scheme like "IIb" instead of "Part 2, Episode 2" might help? Or maybe nothing's needed at all and I'm just worrying too much?

While Amitabha and the main ship remain docked with the Eye in the outer reaches of the solar system, in superluminal communication with Sol through the ansible link at its core

This and a few other places should maybe say star system instead of solar system to avoid momentary confusion regarding who is where.

That's a good idea. I just changed that globally except when referring to the actual Sol star system.

I think the numbering system is fine, it'll make it easier to go back and read a few episodes chronologically if someone gets lost with the plot jumping around. The main reason I was confused was that the description of that section started with 2/1

Pfhorrest wrote:I do worry sometimes that that "First Episode" link at the very top might be too easy to gloss over.

Pfhorrest wrote:Do you think I need to do something to make it more obvious that people should start there?

It's easy enough to find, but the introductory page is full of spoilers, I read a lot of it before I realised that. Maybe put a "begins <a href="2/2">here</a> in media res, then continues...of each saga" link in the the canonical reading order section of the /chronicles main page.

A continue link at the bottom of each episode should work fine, no reason to add a whole other menu when the pages are that short. I didn't look at it before, just figured that the previous-next bar was a separate part of the header and could simply be duplicated at the bottom, but it won't be that easy since the entire menu is one piece.

I'm going to be busy this weekend, so I won't have muchTim for reading, but hopefully I will Monday, it looks like a fun story.

Pfhorrest wrote:Do you think I need to do something to make it more obvious that people should start there?

It's easy enough to find, but the introductory page is full of spoilers, I read a lot of it before I realised that. Maybe put a "begins <a href="2/2">here</a> in media res, then continues...of each saga" link in the the canonical reading order section of the /chronicles main page.

That's a good idea. I think I should maybe also put something even higher up than that, on its own line in the prose near the beginning, about the rest of the page containing spoilers and where to start if you don't want them. I'm not sure how much of that high-level overview stuff is spoilery and how much is necessary to even tell people what the Chronicles are about. I've struggled whenever someone asks me "what's it about?" in live conversation because I just don't know what to say that's both interesting and not spoilery. "It's a science-fantasy story about aliens and immortals and virtual reality but not usually at the same time", or something?

A continue link at the bottom of each episode should work fine

Cool, I'll try to add that next week, among some other reorganizational things I plan on doing on my nominal "week off" from writing.

I'm going to be busy this weekend, so I won't have muchTim for reading, but hopefully I will Monday, it looks like a fun story.

Thank you so much for saying so, that's the kind of encouragement I've been craving all year.

Some explanation of how the story is structured is useful, since there are multiple narratives and the episodes aren't arranged chronologically.Everything below the flow chart image is spoilery, still good if you want a condensed version.

Thanks again for that feedback. I've added a note directly below the canonical ordering bullet point / before the flowchart image that the outline that follows the flowchart image is spoilery and to start at the (hyperlinked) Beyond the Eye of Chaos: Part 2, Episode 2 to start reading the canonical narrative order. I also reintroduced the not-narrative-order overall outline at the very bottom of the page, after the narrative-order outline.

So my life kind of imploded on me again last week and I didn't get any of the work I planned to do on my "week off" from writing done, and I'm half a week late to start now this week, but I'm back on track again.

Nurbal Colony: Part 1 (the first three episodes of the final series of the Ehrban saga) is up now. I'll try to squeeze parts 2 and 3 in later this week too.

Awesomesauce, those are all fixed too. (Except the "magic nuke" one, because I couldn't find more than two occurrences of phrases like that, and that doesn't seem excessive). I will be out of town until Monday anyway so enjoy your weekend and thanks again!

GnomeAnne wrote:How did Xio get his special food while he was growing up? His grandmother? Did the human parents know about him?

Yes and probably. When I write in more detail I'll have to figure out how Keie was smuggling ambrosia/soma/xian-gu to Earth when she had no excuse to need it herself, but that's the idea. And the human parents were probably in the know and sworn to secrecy for Xio's protection, since Keie was already an ageless immortal living among them for generations, so that's the kind of thing she could probably get someone to trust her on. (Someone's disdain for mortal humanity -- probably Kron's given how the Greeks glorified the period of his rule -- is showing in the Greek interpretation of those poor foster parents as "wolves").

With most of the episodes being less than one screen of text, a link at the end like I was suggesting before really isn't necessary.

I didn't get as much read tonight as I thought I would:

Pantheon Exodus: Part 1, Episode 2overthewoverthrew

imprison Xio's bretherenbrethren

just as he condemn'scondemns

Pantheon Exodus: Part 1, Episode 3Met is, of course, understandably furious at being essentially murdered by her lover, and her disembodied mind then trapped within the mind of the very murderer himself.

and having her

I like the way this is set up, but I have a hard Tim keeping track of three separate plots at once. I'll have to read it again once it's all polished up and finished.

GnomeAnne wrote:With most of the episodes being less than one screen of text, a link at the end like I was suggesting before really isn't necessary.

Since those pages will eventually be longer, I should probably just go ahead and add the links preemptively now, when I have time during my "week off" the week after next. (During which time I also hope to rearrange the Pantheon series slightly too; basically I'm just moving Metis' death up to just before the Flood instead of just after it, and shuffling some other things around for pacing around that, so none of the plot you've just read will really be different).

I didn't get as much read tonight as I thought I would:

That's good for me actually, as I'm exhausted and headed for bed now myself. Thanks again for all your help, and those last few bits are fixed now too.

I like the way this is set up, but I have a hard Tim keeping track of three separate plots at once. I'll have to read it again once it's all polished up and finished.

I'm glad you like it. It's meant to be intentionally a little challenging. My dream is that some day, as finished versions of these stories are released at a measured pace, a fan community will be discussing them as they come out and have fun sharing realizations about how they all connect with each other in ways that were not immediately obvious on first reading. I do still want them each to at least make their own internal sense enough on the first read though, so if something is more than just a mysterious connection to something in the greater universe you can't quite track, but rather something that keeps you from understanding the immediate plot as it unfolds, please do let me know.

Slightly off-topic, but I was just re-listening to and wanted to share the song that started getting my creative juices flowing back around the start of the year and inspired me to start working on this again.

The way it slowly builds up to an aborted crescendo and then falls back, then builds up again even more and falls back again, over and over until the explosive climax, as well as the goosebump-indicing general feeling of "holiness", and the associated movie's tripartite theme connecting the ancient world to the distant future, really make it feel like my informal soundtrack to the whole Chronicles, though I mostly associate it in my mind with the Oumen saga, especially the Pantheon series.

It's not spoilery at all, since it's basically just a super early version of the story of Beyond the Eye of Chaos and even then barely any of it survived down to now. It's super embarrassing though, because it was written by a hyperactive 15 year old version of me, but meh, with that qualification, I don't really mind the embarrassment.

("E3" is short for "Escape Engine Enhancement", as our first game was planned to be called "Escape", and this was one of several ideas floated for the next game we would make after it).

And The Fountain is super amazing, but it seems almost nobody has heard of it despite being made by big-name people. Here's a trailer for it, that doesn't really do it justice but still almost brings a tear to my eye:

Basically the entire movie is set, more or less, to that song I linked; not like it's playing continuously, but parts of the song play in more or less chronological order throughout the movie, so listening to the song is like a shortened version of the emotional journey of the movie.

Someday I want the Chronicles to feel like an even bigger, longer emotional journey of a similar nature.

Listening to another song from The Fountain, The Last Man, and imagining Thomas in Sphidia some time around The Meantime of the Darklight, sadly watching ghosts returning from the battlefields to haunt the Chalman army's camp, and reflecting on how really, everyone there is a ghost of sorts, everyone is dead, the world he once knew is destroyed and the only survivors (so far as he knows), if you could even call them that, are trapped here with him in this artificial hell -- and most of them, all of them besides him and Xiuying somewhere on the other side of the world, don't even know they're dead -- and wondering... should he tell them? Any of them? Do they deserve to know, or would telling them just be needlessly cruel?

Or the moment on his own deathbed when he finally tells John, tells him that he's been dead for tens of thousands of years already, they all have, John's just forgotten it like all of the others, and now, now Tom will forget too, and cease to be Tom anymore even though something else will be reborn in his place... and he's so sorry to tell John, but someone has to know, to remember, the entire world can't forget...

Wow.That movie is really good.I don't know that I would have liked it much on its own, but it makes a stunning backdrop for Quelouva, and I love the soundtrack.I was hoping to be able to read some more over the weekend, but that's not going to happen.

I'm really glad you like it. I've been getting so into the music lately that I finally got the whole soundtrack so I can listen to it while I'm writing and hopefully help get me into a better mood to write well than "shit only have an hour left in the day better write something quick augh".

There's a possibility that I might find time to write Part 2 as well tonight, since I've got most of this story sketched out already in more detail than usual and I'm going to be a day short on writing time this week so if I can get ahead of schedule a day I should try.